Lifeboat Foundation

A tiny robot which can travel deep into the lungs to detect and treat the first signs of cancer has been developed by researchers at the University of Leeds. The ultra-soft tentacle, which measures just two millimeters in diameter, and is controlled by magnets, can reach some of the smallest bronchial tubes and could transform the treatment of lung cancer. The researchers tested the magnetic tentacle robot on the lungs of a cadaver and found that it can travel 37 percent deeper than the standard equipment and leads to less tissue damage. It paves the way for a more accurate, tailored, and far less invasive approach to treatment.

The work is published in Nature Engineering Communications in the paper, “Magnetic personalized tentacles for targeted photothermal cancer therapy in peripheral lungs.”

“This new approach has the advantage of being specific to the anatomy, softer than the anatomy and fully-shape controllable via magnetics,” notes Pietro Valdastri, PhD, director of the Science and Technologies Of Robotics in Medicine (STORM) Lab at the University of Leeds. “These three main features have the potential to revolutionize navigation inside the body.”

Difficulty swallowing (dysphagia) affects your quality of life and your health. The ability to safely swallow is vital for adequate nutrition and hydration, and it prevents foods and liquids from entering your lungs, where they can cause pneumonia.

Can the fountain of youth come in the form a pill?

Imagine this: a cocktail of specialized chemicals that rejuvenates your whole body, from your eyes and brain to your kidneys and muscles—bringing you back to a more youthful version of yourself.

Continue reading “Breakthrough in Age Reversal” »

Giant waves have been found swirling in the plasma at the boundary of Jupiter’s magnetosphere, scientists have found.

Data from Juno suggests the Jupiter probe regularly dips through these waves, invisible to the naked eye, as it orbits the giant planet. The discovery helps astronomers understand how mass and energy is transferred from the solar wind to the Jovian planetary environment.

Continue reading “Giant Swirling Plasma Waves Detected at The Edge of Jupiter’s Magnetosphere” »

Powerful tech companies keep LLMs like GPT-4 shrouded in secrecy. But a new wave of open-source LLMs is giving the power of chatbots to the people.

The world’s largest community of 3D-printed homes is being built in Texas — and the neighborhood just unveiled its first completed house.

With walls “printed” using a concrete-based material, the single-story structure is the first of 100 such homes set to welcome residents starting September.

The community is part of a wider development in Georgetown, Texas called Wolf Ranch. It’s located about 30 miles north of Austin, the state capital, and is a collaboration between Texas construction firm ICON, homebuilding company Lennar and Danish architecture practice Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG).

The half-dozen creatures, a type of nematode or roundworm, were last awake when Neanderthals and woolly mammoths roamed the Earth.

AlexanderFord/iStock.

By donating these healthy corneas to individuals afflicted with corneal diseases, which are among the most common causes of vision loss, patients can benefit from improved vision and potentially regain their sight.

More often than not, studies of human biology are conducted when the body is under duress from infection or disease. Now, as part of a larger effort to delineate what “healthy” looks like, two Stanford Medicine teams have unfurled detailed molecular maps of healthy human intestinal and placental tissues. The maps, which capture cell types, cell quantity and other cellular nuances, are just two of a collection of maps that will establish a cellular baseline for the majority of the human body, including where cells in certain tissues congregate, how tissues develop during pregnancy and how cell-to-cell interactions drive human biology.

The studies, which published in Nature on July 19, are part of a larger effort spearheaded by the Human Biomolecular Atlas Program — called HuBMAP — funded by the National Institutes of Health. It aims to fill gaps in our knowledge of how the human body works when it’s in tip-top shape. Dozens of teams from the United States and Europe contribute to the HuBMAP consortium.

Continue reading “Stanford Medicine researchers take part in HuBMAP, showing what healthy human tissue looks like” »